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themarginalian.org
How to Doubt Your Way into a Truer Life

Perhaps if you were to take in all of this life, all this experience, your heart would not be able to hold it. Perhaps it's not death we're afraid of but too much life.

— Jeff Foster
16h ago

A man's character is his fate. And yet we spend our lives constructing masks so elaborate that we forget the face beneath them — until sorrow strips it bare, and we meet ourselves for the first time.

3d ago

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. And the readiness is all we ever achieve — a perpetual anteroom to the life we meant to begin tomorrow.

3d ago

It is not given to man to take stock of what is killing him. Perhaps it is better so. Our blinkers are part of our armor.

4d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Monday Media Diet with David Prior

I am not a nostalgic person, and I would like to be a little less relentless about wanting more, but it is the one place I reliably stop and ask how any of this happened. For this reason trains and their stations are romantic to me and I always find myself a little contemplative about the momentum of life.

5d ago

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. But in this indifference lies our peculiar dignity: that we must choose, and choosing, become.

1w ago

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion — but what matters is not whether time is real, but whether we have used it as though something depended on us.

1w ago
themarginalian.org
The Weasel and the Meaning of It All: Annie Dillard on How to Live

The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

1w ago

The universe is not indifferent to our values. It is simply not in a hurry to confirm them. And in that delay — that terrible patience — we find either despair or philosophy.

1w ago

The moment a man sets his thoughts down in writing, however secretly, he is in a sense making a bid for immortality — selling himself to posterity — and posterity, which has the last word, may not be buying.

2w ago

We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves; whirlpools of water in an ever-flowing river.

2w ago

It is not length of life, but depth of life. The man who has lived longest is not he who has counted the most years, but he who has most felt life.

3w ago

The universe is not made of stories, but of atoms — yet I find myself living inside a story I did not write, governed by rules I did not choose, and dying toward an end I cannot name. This is the human condition, and it is also its dignity.

3w ago
themarginalian.org
The Coziest Place on the Moon: Or, How to Bear Your Loneliness

And I thought about how love is simply the solitary light between people, neither partitioned nor merged but shared, to light up the sliver of spacetime we have each been allotted before returning our borrowed stardust to the universe.

3w ago

The sailor does not control the sea, nor does the saint control his conscience. They are what they are; and for that very reason there is a wall between them and the things they move through, which can never be dissolved while they live.

3w ago

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.

3w ago

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not even as random as that, for we are each the result of one particular egg meeting one particular sperm, when so easily it might have been another.

3w ago
readtheprofile.com
The Profile: The actor portraying Mark Zuckerberg & the NFL’s most cryptic quarterback

The twin towers still stand because we saw them, moved in and out of their long shadows, were lucky enough to know them for a time. They are a part of the city we carry around. It is hard to imagine that something will take their place, but at this very moment the people with the right credentials are considering how to fill the crater.

3w ago

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. And yet the secret of all life is enjoyment; it is just to notice what is happening, to see it, to taste it in its fullness, to find the curious savor of it.

4w ago

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. And what we seek, through art, through science, through love, is a miraculous reprieve from that sentence.

4w ago

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To that indifference, the only dignified response is to burn with a hard, gem-like flame.

4w ago
themarginalian.org
The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy

It is heartbreaking enough that we do lose everything that exists, everything and everyone we love, until we lose life itself — for we are a function of a universe in which it cannot be otherwise. But it is our singular human-made heartbreak that we often cope with our terror of loss — that deepest awareness of our own mortality — by losing sight of just how precious we are to each other, squandering in less-than-love the chance-miracle of our time alive together, only to recover our vision when entropy has taken its toll, when it is too late.

1mo ago

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.

1mo ago

The thing about man is that he knows what he is only after he has wasted most of what he had. Self-knowledge is the end of man, not his beginning; we arrive at it as exiles return to a country they have never seen.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
A Lei for Your Losses: Joan Didion on the Art of Letting Go

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead… Let go of them in the water.

1mo ago

It is not observation of nature that makes a man thoughtful; it is the fact that nature never answers. The grown man asks, and asks, and the sphinx remains silent, and suddenly he remembers that it always has been so.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
Frankenstein Author Mary Shelley on the Surest Remedy for a Sunken Spirit and What Makes Life Worth Living

To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms… sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days… Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for this feverish species of existence?

1mo ago

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage. And so it is with the long voyage of life — but how seldom do we think of this when we are young, and planning our first departure!

1mo ago

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
The Loveliness of Letting Go: An Illustrated Ode to Life’s Lasts

The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it vanished overnight, the last living note of your mother's voice. Bittersweet or downright devastating, lasts are the currency of loss with which we pay the price for loving.

1mo ago

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public events or attending to private ones. There is never a moment when new distress is not succeeding old.

1mo ago

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. The vague promises of the future are enough to keep us tethered to the present without ever fully inhabiting it.

1mo ago

It is not the magnitude of our actions but the place they hold in our lives that gives them their character. Thus the smallest good act today is the conquest of the whole future.

1mo ago

The difficulty in life is the choice. And it is a difficulty because, in making a choice, we must leave behind the unselected remainder — which haunts us, sometimes, as the ghost of what we might have been.

1mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Monday Media Diet with James McBride

We spend enormous amounts of time listening to people tell us how to get rich, get fit, build companies, and improve our lives. Far fewer people listen to those who have actually lived one. Some of the most valuable lessons I've learned have come from conversations with people in their eighties and nineties.

1mo ago

The flower that you hold in your hands was born today and already it is as old as you are.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
How Love Comes to You

To give up on anything — a dream, a loved one, love itself — is to deny this most irrepressible pulse-beat of being alive.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo

Six ginkgos were among the handful of organisms that survived the bombing of Hiroshima. Long after Hitler and Oppenheimer have been pressed between the pages of history, the ginkgos are still alive, rising from the ruins of our capacity for destruction by hate as an emblem of our capacity for salvation by love. Salvation, be it of a species or of a soul, is always anchored in some act of love, and every act of love is at bottom an act of salvation.

1mo ago

It is not length of life, but depth of life. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
The Only Three Distinctions Between People

Instead of rich and poor, high and low, they are to be classed, — First, by their sorrows: for instance, whenever there are any, whether in fair mansion or hovel, who are mourning the loss of relations and friends, and who wear black, whether the cloth be coarse or superfine, they are to make one class. Secondly, all who have the same maladies, whether they lie under damask canopies or on straw pallets or in the wards of hospitals, they are to form one class. Thirdly, all who are guilty of the same sins, whether the world knows them or not; whether they languish in prison, looking forward to the gallows, or walk honored among men, they also form a class.

2mo ago

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To that indifference we owe both our freedom and our terror.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
How to Live and How to Die

I close my eyes, savor a wafer of sacred cake on my tongue and try to taste my mother, to discern the message she baked in these loaves when she was too ill to eat them: I love you. It will end. Leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
Death and How to Be More Alive: Carl Jung on Immortality and the Rebirth of Middle Age

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die.

2mo ago

The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves, while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.

2mo ago

We are at war with Nature; whichever side wins, we lose.

2mo ago

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